Expressions via Lumira : Infographic

[Former Member]

Hello All

As a person, who is fascinated with beauty of data and its visualizations, I wanted to get my hands dirty with lumira for long and finally I have been to able to do so for past few days. Objective of this post is to share my experience and seek your valuable inputs on how to improve things further. I am assuming you know about Lumira, so will not go to its capabilities.

First Impression about Lumira:

Good: easy, fun, powerful. Very small learning curve even for person who would be afraid of data.

Can be better: More tweaking capability for charts/visualizations. More data preparation capabilities.

I have created below infographic and story using data which is publically available at http://www.gapminder.org/data/.

This data set is few years old, but we are not looking for current data but to use the data to create story out of it.  Also, I dont claim to personally verify this data set, nor I think anyone should be bothered about actual data set as it's not about data validity but more about its data extensions, as i earlier said.

Topic I have selected is " Arms trades" and I am sure you must have seen numerous infographic related to this. But what I was interested was in knowing not trade done by countries in just one year but say over the years. I have chosen decade timeframe from 2001 - 2010 for all countries in the world and tried to analyse the data using absolute dollar values and with regards to GDP. I am reminded of great quote by Mark twain "Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable"

Right now I am sharing one page infographic, but will post later storyboard as time permists. This data set can be further enriched when we try to compare numbers relative to other social indicators, may be topic of other infographics too. All this was created using Lumira only and no graphic/editing software was used. This demonstrated the power of Lumira as well.

My main focus was to :

• Create effective infographic to capture viewers attention
• Convey the data visually without excessive relying on text to do so.
• Use most appropriate visuals to create better punch.

I would love to hear your views on below. Also, feel free to share on how to further enrich this and make it better? How would you make it better?

Acknowledgtments:

Also, for pictograms, I have used website http://www.flaticon.com/ and these beautiful icons were designed by "Freepik" and all licenses and credits goes to them.